With the advent of network and mobile technologies, Internet video broadcasting has become an important part of everyday life, as people increasingly receive video content through the Internet and consume media content at their mobile devices. The rapid growth of Internet video broadcasting also fuels the demand for real-time video capturing and transmission over the Internet, which involves capturing and coding of video images into digital data, packetizing the digital data, and transmitting the video data packets over the Internet.
With current technologies, real-time video capturing and transmission includes connecting a camera to a processing device (e.g., a computer) with Internet connectivity. The computer, upon receiving the coded video image digital data, can packetize the digital data into data packets, and then transmit the data packets over the Internet to other devices. The setup of the equipment for real-time video capturing and transmission can be tedious and time-consuming. Moreover, the camera typically does not adjust the size of video image digital data (e.g., by adjusting the resolution of image capturing) according to a status of the network traffic. If the camera transmits a huge volume of data when the network is already congested, the data packets can either experience a huge latency in transmission over the network, or can be dropped and not transmitted over the network at all. As a result, the user experience can be substantially degraded. Methods and apparatus are provided for addressing one or more of these issues.